Frost and Flowers: Jackunzel Requests
by Nerumi H
Summary: A collection of the prompt fills I have received through my tumblr, all involving copious amounts of flirting, silliness, and AUs. CH9: After the funeral, the spirit Rapunzel has to learn and Jack is the only teacher.
1. Chapter 1

.prompt.: **A Hogwarts AU where Rapunzel is looking everywhere for Jack and finds him in the place she had least expected him to be. At the library. STUDYING.**

.prompt by.: **completelytwitterpated on tumblr, aka Justine.**

.universe.: **Hogwarts AU**

.a/n.: **I've been taking prompts through my tumblr account (spidereating-manbitch) and I really wanted to upload them, despite them all being relatively short (for me) and being mostly plotless. So here we are! If you have any Jackunzel or Tangled to request, go right on ahead to my tumblr.**

**Also Justine, who gave me the original prompt, drew this fantastic piece for it and I urge you to check it out: completelytwitterpated . tumblr .com(/)post(/)50095213323**

**X**

"Do you know where Jack is?" seems to be her theme today, told to anyone she passes or who is unlucky enough to talk to her first, because after all, everyone knew who he was. And everyone knew he could get into trouble, but the sort of which is what is currently nagging at Rapunzel. Jack has a habit of being, for lack of a better term, in everyone's face all the time, and when he isn't hanging around Rapunzel messing with her hair or begging her to finish papers for him, she can get concerned. This school doesn't have the cleanest record for a lack of death traps (as her mother endlessly reminds her) and Jack can stick his hands in all the wrong places when he's bored.

It has been nearly an hour and the night is getting aged, and Rapunzel still hasn't found him. She didn't get anything from Merida nor Hiccup nor Jack's odd little band of first-year fanboys. Not even the tell-tale staircases with the trick ice steps came across her. It's beginning to look to her like Jack is either as lost as her, or is playing a seriously stupid trick.

She can actively decide that the second option is the more likely one, but passively she's still being pestered by the possibilities of Jack having ticked off the wrong beast. To distract herself from causes she can't fix, she retreats to the library and hopes that maybe some studying will summon him as quick as _accio._ He has a certain fondness for bugging her while she's trying to study.

She wanders into one of the towering aisles, armed with parchment, a quill, and an ink pot from her dormitory. She's just checking through divination tomes when she hears a very disgruntled groaning from the end of the hall, and turns to see a shocking oddity - the person is hidden, slumped over a desk behind a pile of books, but she cannot mistake that frosted staff for anyone else's.

She smirks to herself, and tucks away the book she'd been looking at with all the silence the dusted pages can manage. Her lack of shoes helps her tiptoe over to him and suddenly pop up from the stack of books, merrily grinning down at the white-blonde head of hair below.

She's relieved that she found him, but the wondering of perhaps he'd been cursed is not yet lost. Perhaps even reinforced. Jack never studies, yet here he is, amongst many open books and jolting unceremoniously at her sudden whisper.

"I thought I'd seen everything!" Rapunzel giggles quietly, laying her head on her folded arms atop the books.

Jack looks groggy, and shoves back his hair while fixing her with an exhausted rendition of his usual half-smile. He leans back in his chair, gesturing to himself. "Observe the Jackson Overland in its unnatural habitat. Parental pressure and threats of detention with Pitch have driven him here, but now he risks extinction."

"At the hand of education?" Rapunzel grins, reaching over to pluck up the paper he last seemed to be writing on. Jack groans and tries to swipe it back, but she's faster.

"Oh, Jackson," Rapunzel simpers, reading over his aggressive scrawl, "Wasn't this unit in December?"

"I know, I know, it's stupid and shame on me. Give it back."

She complies by reaching his side of the table and setting the parchment in front of him. She waves over a chair that slides in time with her sitting. Now that she's at his level, she folds her hands in her lap and tries to illuminate that distasteful expression on his face with her always-chipper grin. It only half works, getting Jack to lightly laugh and stick the quill before her.

"Well, Punz, if you're being so generous, I insist."

She gives it back. "Nope."

"Oh, so now you're asking for a price? Fine. Money's not your thing, so," he pretends to think, then points at her as his other hand subtly shoves over the quill. "I'll buy you anything and everything in Honeydukes. Do we have a deal? Of course we do."

"Jack," she says patiently, "this isn't all that hard. You just have to apply yourself! Look, you got this far," she animatedly gestures at the crooked settlement of books, "which is farther than ever before. So you may as well finish what you started."

She smiles sweetly at him, to which he flatly stares - she gives one more nudge to the quill and he finally gives in with an audible acquiescence. She happily kisses him and settles neatly in her chair to oversee what he's doing.

At first the answer to that is a tired nothing, but then he gives her a very important look and opens one of the books. He sarcastically claps for himself and she joins in before realizing - "Wrong book, Jackie."

Jack moans. "They're all the wrong book! You know what we have back home? Internet! You just hit little alphabet buttons to spell out what you want and the answers all appear! It's a magical concept yet ironically has NOTHING to do with magic so they shun it here like all other logic."

"You don't need to be grumpy about it," Rapunzel teases good-naturedly, and after glancing over the titles, locates a book from the center of the mess. She's practically memorized the table of contents of this one and can at least celebrate him on selecting one of the more useful books in the library. But as she unearths it, from the many layers of homework slips a tome bookmarked with folded, inscribed parchment. She curiously pulls it out - Jack makes a little noise of disagreement.

The date on it is today's, and that script is most definitely his. However, the paper is complete in jotnotes, and on potions relating to, "...Mind and situational obstructions... Jack - "

"That's extra stuff. It's done; I was surprised too." But the hurry to his voice and the way he tries to get at it makes her even more curious.

"Extra things for punishment?"

"Yeah, but that isn't what I need your input on right now - "

"That doesn't make sense. We haven't even started this yet! That's chapters away!"

"Hence 'extra'."

"I don't think she'd make you work on things chapters away; that would only get you to pay less attention when we actually get to it, and..." Rapunzel raises an eyebrow, glancing over at him slyly. "Are you actually writing notes because you _want_ to?"

He drops his jaw into his hand and looks away in annoyance.

She leans towards him. "Were you really threatened by Pitch?" His lack of answer and instead resolute flipping of pages tells her that her guess is right. "You weren't?"

He looks up and states wryly, "Just figured it wouldn't kill me to not look like such an idiot around you."

Rapunzel exclaims, "No, it won't kill you; you'll love it!" She excitedly pops back to her seat, pushing the books under his nose enthusiastically. "Especially when we get to extracurricular projects and history studies all the way to the first wizard. Then you'll be so swamped you'll never leave study hall again, and we'll never talk about anything else ever!"

He cocks an eyebrow at her, facing her newly cheeky grin. She's successful - he lightly shoves her shoulder, loosely chuckling. "Don't do that, you'll scare me out of it."

She scoots her chair to his side of the table, slouching down to better level with him and his head resting in his hand on the surface. She speaks far more calmly this time, her grin calmed to an honest smile. "As much as I approve of you actually getting classwork done, don't torture yourself." She assures him, "You do NOT look like an idiot. And you aren't one either."

He slowly cocks an eyebrow at her, openly disbelieving.

She resigns, giggling to show she's kidding, "Maybe you're slightly lower than average in arithmetic."

"See, now you're being truthful."

"But nobody needs that class, so you're just Jackson Overland-who-is-impressing-in-countless-other-ways , through and through." Rapunzel nuzzles closer, bringing forth the quill to his hand. She flashes him a smile to which he can only respond with one of his own, while he takes the feather from her. "So, do you want to start?"

He asks earnestly, "You _are_ gonna help, right?"

"Of course. Wouldn't want such an adorable specimen to go extinct."


	2. Chapter 2

.prompt.: **"I have been a conspirator for so long that I mistrust all around me."**

.prompt by.: **deaniethebeanie on tumblr**

.universe.: **Modern AU**

.a/n.: **This was the first one I completed, actually. I really loved the idea to it and I still want to expand on it but I'm too busy with other fics. In any case, enjoy!**

**X**

I have been a conspirator for so long that I mistrust all around me.

Maybe it comes with the job description. If it does, I think I should have been warned beforehand - a few heists and a teeny tiny assisted drug traffic sort of reached me before I got to read the terms and conditions. Now, when surrounded by people who act too much like you but think as secretly as gold safes, it's a little tricky to not be driven around by paranoia like a hitchhiker who's seriously made a mistake in selections.

Besides, it's not paranoia if you can honestly say you had your roommate wake you up with a wave of gasoline to your sheets, a pack of matches in hand, and the words, "Jack, you better get up right now."

Hence why Merida and I are currently auditioning for some stock-script Wild West film and sitting in the open carriage of a train. She's across from me, shoving her hair out of her face constantly, playing a sort of aggressive footsie game with me whenever I start to drift off.

The third time it happens, I wave her away. "You're the one who woke me up so early. I'm your problem now."

"You're always my problem," she scoffs, and gives me another kick. "If you didn't make Hiccup steal that car - "

I return the favour with extreme maturity. "He needed to start somewhere if he's gonna be friends with us."

"Yeah, but with that shitty thing?" Merida snorts and sinks further into the crates she leans against, but I detect her flash of a smirk at the memory we're both replaying in our heads. "It had no bite at all..."

Of course my memory of the scene is tarnished by the appearance of someone I very much wish had never been there in the first place. "He would have chosen a better one if Blondie wasn't with us."

"You brought Rapunzel there? Are you demented?"

"Only to an extent I can handle."

Merida throws back her head dramatically, _thunk_ing it against the crates. "You can't do that to her. That's like exploiting a little kid."

_"She _decided to try and worm her way into this group. She gets what's coming to her."

Maybe that was a lie. Hiccup was the one who insisted that Rapunzel come - she was little and blonde and new, and even struck me as kind of dumb if I'm being honest. …_Too_ dumb.

I'd never met her beforehand, but Hiccup was adamant with how legitimate this girl was. Apparently she was good at creative plans, but she had yet to show me that, especially when my impression was being swiftly tarnished by her girlish giggling and "Are you guys SURE we should do this? I hear whoever that was like checked to not be here by Jack a thousand times is like super duper possessive of his stuff! Like what if he calls the police!"

Paraphrasing, but still.

It didn't make anything better that she kept checking her phone and not telling even Hiccup who she was talking to.

Oh, wow, we've finally circled back to my initial point. This Rapunzel girl was dumb and suspicious, a bit too blonde and a bit too peppy and a bit too dodgy when it comes to my questions. If that avoidance of inquiries had any correlation with Hiccup rolling his eyes between us at everything I asked, I don't know. I don't think so. I just think Hiccup is bad at choosing friends who aren't super fucking shifty.

Merida doesn't have a reply for me, instead just dismissing all my reasoning with her usual huff and silence. It's not much of a gesture, but she can play it as the most offensive thing ever. No wonder her mom got sick of her so quick.

(Of course, Merida can't stay mad at me for long, and we're playing an immensely lazy version of charades in which we sit across from each other and there's a lot of "Oh just fucking guess right already!" by the time the train slows at a station.)

Merida is good at transport schedules so there's a reason we got on this train, and not just because of the very narrow ratio of time between "We can get away safe" and "Well fuck, we're screwed." None of the cargo here is set to leave at this station, so we should be fine to hitch for another few hours.

However, we are expecting an addition of cargo no more than we're expecting a loss. So when Hiccup pops his freckled face above the floor of the cart, both Merida and I can only shout, "What are _you_ doing here?!"

"Oh, whoa, thank god I found you." He hoists himself in from the dimness. "And I'm here for the same reason as you," he answers breathlessly, as if he actually tried running after the train before it fully stopped. And then he, just my luck, turns and holds out a hand to another person.

Rapunzel climbs in just as I loudly groan: "Not her. Please don't tell me you brought her."

Rapunzel smirks happily my way (as I guessed, I can see the weight of a cell phone in her cardigan pocket). Hiccup enlightens me with, "Jack, you stink like gasoline."

"You can thank your girlfriend for making me her perfume guinea pig this morning."

Merida scowls at the nickname and explains briefly while Hic and Rapunzel settle themselves amongst us, "I got the call from Flynn that Gaston knew who took his car. And that _someone _had been getting his feet wet in the guy's bank account."

I hold up my hands.

"And I figured it was a good time to skip town for a bit."

"So I was right. It is for the same reason." Hiccup scratches his hair out of his face, shrugging. "Except - "

"Eugene heard from me," Rapunzel explains, leaning forwards from where she's seated next to Merida so she can address us all. We're not unfamiliar to Flynn's actual name, but all (disregarding me when a little bugging is needed) know it's a better plan to call him by his preferred title. She apparently does not know this rule of thumb in street identities.

I raise an eyebrow at her. "And how did you catch on?"

"Well, when Hiccup and I tried to go back and return Toothless - "

Merida blurts, "You tried to return the car?" as I laugh, "You named it Toothless?"

Hiccup waves a hand at Rapunzel, visually unimpressed by her retelling. "Punz named it, and if you don't mind, that's where the story is ending."

"That's not the full story. Details are important, Hic." I turn to Rapunzel, who seems almost surprised at having me directly look at her. So am I, really. "Continue the tale of untimely failure."

She starts talking and Hiccup drops his head into his hands. "It was kind of tricky since Toothless was so noisy, and Gaston ended up hearing it - so as soon as he opens the door to get at us, Hiccup just tears the whole car around and speeds back down the street and he doesn't stop until we get here." And she completes the whole run-on sentence with a cherubic giggle. Are you kidding me.

I turn to Hiccup, nudging him with my foot. "The brief version of that would be that Hiccup ran like a coward."

"He had a rifle," Hiccup mutters into his arms, groaning.

"I think it was really cool of him," Rapunzel volunteers, smirking his way. "I'd recommend going for less shrieking, but still, you should have heard Toothless!"

Hiccup mumbles, "I think they've heard enough about it, Rapunzel."

"Hey, buddy, no one's holding it against you," I say in my best mock sympathy voice.

Merida scoffs again. "You're only saying that because it's your fault it even happened."

"Whatever." Now that we've got enough of the stories that I care for, I fold my arms behind my head, smirking at all of them. "Isn't this fun? On the road again, the whole gang. And Blondie."

She gives me a prim little smile and crosses her legs, wriggles into her seat, and begins to address Merida with some subject I can't distract myself with. The fact that she still has that stupid phone is driving me nuts. I swear the next time she dares open it, I'm gonna take it and read everything she has logged. None of us know her well enough for her to be allowed to tag along while we're both law and personally wanted criminals.

I can just hope the ride goes smoothly.

(Heads up, it doesn't.)

About an hour after the train gets back on the road, everyone's asleep but me and Rapunzel. Hic and Merida have moved to the back of the car so they're suitably hidden between the crates just in case, which is fine since I'd really rather not see them cuddling like high schoolers, but on the downside that leaves Rapunzel and I alone without the pretext of my friends' slumber to excuse our silence.

One thing I discover is that it looks like we're both all too willing to break a silence.

Rapunzel crawls up to where I'm sitting on one of the boxes, and sets herself right up against my side. Her green eyes are like eerie lanterns in the midnight, hair glowing like a ghost. I know she's smiling and that just makes it creepier.

"So, Jack," she starts, drawing out my name, "how did you start this wild life of crime?"

I snicker at her question. I can practically hear the smirk in her voice. "That's a really long story."

"Did you see it on TV and thought it would be cool?"

I exclaim, mock offended, "Who do you take me for?"

She just crosses her legs at the knee and props her chin in her palm atop it. And smirks some more. She's got me challenged for who can best overuse that expression.

I gesture minutely at her. "Your face makes me not want the answer to that question."

"I take you for a very confused teenage boy who dearly wants to impress his friends and get attention from his parents." She nods with her words, sounding overly professional - sarcastically so. "Or at least, that's what all the books say."

"Do they?"

"Juvenile delinquency is a very serious ailment, Jackson."

I chuckle, finally taking my eyes permanently off her pocket to say, "How can I be fixed?"

"Lots of love and care. Like a hamster or a Furby."

She is so weird. Final verdict. I don't even know where she came from - just one day Hiccup said he had a girl (space!) friend that wanted to tag along for his big rite-of-passage car theft, and then suddenly she's apparently a friend of Merida's from who knows when and then next thing I know, her and her phone are tagging along with us as we try to escape a rival who surely wants our heads.

It all seems really strange to me.

Rapunzel scoots closer, her mouth open to say some more about how I'm just a kicked puppy (she doesn't know the half of it) but stops cold when we both hear it - the clank and clatter of her phone hitting the ground.

We lock eyes for a long moment, and then we both dive to the floor, slamming shoulders and my knee accidentally trapping her foolishly long blonde hair to the ground. It's too dark to see clearly so we both desperately sweep our hands over the ground in search, knocking heads, my pulse going up in a thrill that I am finally gonna see what she's hiding and then _no more_ naive ditz tagging with us anymore -

I clasp something small and square and realize it's the battery pack. Rapunzel huffs and from the glimmer of light against that familiar pink plastic, she's found the casing of the phone.

I wave my paydirt at her. Her eyes lock onto it, and then fix onto me. She doesn't look too happy from what I can tell.

So I edge backwards in the car to the slat of doorway that is open. I hold out my hand - she flinches and squeaks, darting forwards on her knees.

I grin. "Okay, okay, Blondie. Tell me what's on your phone. That's all I want."

Rapunzel huffs, and gets to her feet on the unsteady ground. To match her height, I do so too, but keep my hand poised precariously at the window. She says, "I'm not hiding anything."

"Yeah, that's what everyone says. So come on. Fess up. I run a really neat little organization here and the last thing I need is - "

"So neat that you're scared and on the run?" Rapunzel chirps, folding her arms. I scowl. Damn her point and damn it being valid. She shakes the casing at me. "Besides, if you drop that, then you'll never find out what's really on here."

Okay, damn her again. She's got me constantly frazzled - paranoid and frazzled. Fantastic. I don't lower my threat, though. I've got a really effective line on my tongue (I swear) just as our second surprise attacks - Rapunzel is first to see the shadow and immediately grabs me. With a shove and some muffled swearing, she somehow has me wrangled into a corner of the car, drenched in pitch black with her.

When did the train even stop? She's too distracting.

A train worker climbs into the carriage, a flashlight armed and glaring. I can only see through a tiny slat between two of the boxes, and not very well, considering Rapunzel managed to maneuver herself so her hair is draping into my face. Her knee is in my stomach. She kind of smells like peaches. The flashlight swipes past us and she coils up tighter - I swear she's even trembling. Not exactly the first sign of a conspiring information thief, but I still can't fall for it.

We hold our breath, and I pray Merida and Hiccup chose a good place to crash. I also pray neither start spontaneously snoring. But then the flashlight glow ebbs, and there's a scuff of gravel as the worker leaves.

Rapunzel gasps in my ear, then lets it out slowly, making me squirm unintentionally. "Wow, that was close."

We're still not in the safe zone - for someone who's travelled like this a lot, I know that the workers will sometimes hover. It's a lot of trouble to stop a train, and they're going to investigate goddamn thoroughly if they do. Hence: "Shh!" I hiss at her, and she replies eloquently with, "You shh!"

I try to peer around the case for a double-check, but suddenly, she's trying to wrestle the battery out of my hands. We're practically at gunpoint at she decides to do this _now_. I was right. She is an idiot. An idiot who's nearly got what I've been trying to protect.

I keep a tight hold on the battery, writhing it away from her fingers until I've got it nearly under me where we're half-laying. She isn't giving up, lashing out and scrambling on top of me to snatch it - she's tiny and somehow strong, her fingers clamping on my wrists and trying to wrench open a keyhole for her to get back her precious secret information.

This isn't working. I'm trying to kick her off but the girl won't give up - if I'm reduced to biting her, so be it, because now I'm getting mad. I elbow her stomach and snap, "Shove off! You're not getting this!"

She says, shockingly close to my ear, "You really need to work on your bargaining skills! If you give it to me, I'll show you what I have on here." She pauses, squeezing my wrist. "I promise."

_"You_ give me the phone."

"No, you!"

"You." I glare up at her, now having lost patience. All of it. She's got me way too concerned and way too confused and I can't stand that feeling - apparently my fury about that translates to my expression, because finally she crawls off. She tosses the phone in my lap and huffs.

Snapping in the battery, I check again that we're safe - it looks like we're clear, but I still shade the phone in my unzipped sweater to keep out of view while it glows on. A bright little title screen pours into a background of her and ...well. Her and Flynn. Cute.

Ugh.

I select messages and feel my jaw tighten as I race through the texts - there's gotta be something in here. But I realize, it's so much easier to find incriminating evidence than to find a lack thereof. I'm just always going to think she's hiding something, no matter what I see.

There's stuff between her and Hiccup, and Merida, and Flynn, and some girl named Belle, but more than anything, there's Mother.

Seriously. If I was kidding it wouldn't be half as funny.

"Your _mom?_ Is that who you're always distracted by?"

Rapunzel crookedly pouts and folds her hands in her lap. "Yeah."

But is it really her mom? I check a few messages. Times she'll be home, times she's moving locations, money she's spent, friends she's with, everything. The only time slot lacking is anything within the last four hours - according to her last message, yesterday evening, she was going to Belle's to study and sleep over.

"Jeez," I hear myself exhale, "How many tabs does your mom keep on you?"

"All of them?" Rapunzel says. "A whole binder-full?"

My eyebrows shoot up as I keep scrolling. She's even asking Rapunzel all these addresses and additional phone numbers and license plates to track 'in case they get lost'. I've heard of helicopter parenting, but this is borderline frightening.

"She doesn't know about you guys," Rapunzel assures me, and tries to make a swipe for the phone but I hold it away. I'm done, though. I close the phone, obsession with it immediately severed with this new sort of understanding.

"She wouldn't approve?" I ask teasingly.

"No, she wouldn't. One, there are boys here, and two, we're sort of riding across the state illegally." She looks away for a second, biting her lip minutely and sighing. "Three, I'm out of the house."

So maybe she wasn't some spy - I hadn't searched through her whole phone, but she'd been unwittingly trying to get me to trust her since the start. Hovering parents, I knew them. Not so bad, but I also knew how much she must want to break away, and a juvenile delinquent must be the easiest bet for her.

"So are you happy now?" she asks, tucking away her phone.

"Not entirely." I pull away to get more comfortable, leaning against the wall and regarding her critically. "Look, there are some rules I have to place for my 'neat little organization'..."


	3. Chapter 3

.prompt.: **(I lost it since it wasn't in a message, but it was essentially just Angelverse Jack/Punz.)**

.prompt by.: **mayrajeevas-writes on tumblr**

.universe.: **Angel!verse**

.a/n.: **This precedes a Rapunzel version, and one where they're both angels. Probably. It was just a lot of fun to write and I got to discussing the different versions with people...**

**X**

It's supposed to be obvious.

You know, kind of easy to link the clues together. Mountains are made of rock, and rock isn't good to go smashing into. Mountains come from the ground, and it only makes sense that they'd be the growths of the same material.

Somehow it's still surprising when he's driven into the ground like a wayward torpedo and it fucking _hurts._

The force drags him against the grass for seemingly endless yards, tearing up in a chasm his twisted shoulder is unwittingly burying him under as he tries very hard to not swallow any of the dirt splattering into his face. Gauges of pain splinter through his body and his wings spasm in an effort to fold up and out of danger.

When he finally screeches to a stop, gracefully knocked into a fence, he can only mutter a dejected, "Thanks, Toothless."

Groaning, he lifts himself up, casting a puzzled gaze to his surroundings. The only indication of where he landed is a crater spilling ripped grass and torn flowers everywhere, a wire fence, and acres of barren farmland beyond. A few yards over there is a small thatched cottage.

And then he twists around some more to spot a blonde girl at a clothesline, her green eyes as big as platters and fixed on him.

Welllllllllllll… damn it.

He tries to get up to his feet, maybe explain what the heck is going on (the only excuse there is (that he'll be begging at North's feet sometime soon) was that he and Hiccup decided it would be a good plan to go messing around with his dragon (yeah, presumably-fictional creatures had an afterlife too, who knew?)), but she's just staring in this blank alarm like a rabbit to a rifle.

"Uh, hey," he tries, raising a hand to her, as he shakes the flower petals out of his snowy white hair. Her eyes level with his wings while they spread out wide and ruffle noisily, causing a rain of dirt to shower the ground and down his bare back. Since she says nothing, he gives them another snap that breaks free some more gravel, and maybe he also does it to impress her. That's his job, isn't it? Sure, he isn't the elitist _guardian _angel, but he's something nearly as –

And then he notices her eyes flicking downwards and a blush he had earlier mistaken for a natural rosy hue darkening substantially.

Oh. Yeah. Fricking shallow humans.

He quickly shuts his dusted ivory wings around his body, the span of them adequately covering him from shoulders to knees. She angles her head a bit away but her eyes stick to him, pinned by a shock that he can see slowly daring to morph into curiosity. Her fingers grab the first weapon in proximity – a clothes hanger that she'd been folding a blouse over.

Her feet, bare and tiny, shuffle carefully through the grass, and he doesn't miss how she holds up the hanger like an axe. A shaky sneer pulls up her full lips, and he finds himself trying to suppress the reaction of a laugh.

What did she think he was? Aren't people supposed to drop to their knees and worship creatures like him? He'd never really spoken to anyone much here, so he wouldn't know anything besides what the guardians had gloated about. Although the worshipping would have been plenty fun, her strange reaction churns some plans through his head that he really shouldn't be having. Instead he should be worried about getting back to the sky and letting her down easy about all of this.

She asks like she's about to argue with a criminal, "Who are you?"

"The horribly underrated angel Jack Overland" _should_ be his answer. But it isn't. He lets her get close enough but still a couple feet away, observes the slip of her teeth as she forces a snarl – they stare at each other, an ice-blue to this girl's striking green which is currently squinting with the suppression of what he's sure is a repetition of the same horrified stare as earlier.

He waits until she hesitates another trusting inch forwards, and then decides it'll be amusing to snap out his wings at her and fake a menacing hiss.

Of course, she wasn't bluffing with that weapon. She's got him on the ground in about four dangerous hits, Jack trying to fend her off with flailing arms.

"Okay, okay, that wasn't funny! Stop it!" he shouts, elbowing off another attack. Finally she ceases, stumbling back in obeisance, but then again it may just be because he's unfolded his wings again.

He peers up at her, seeing her fingers warily rewrapping around the metal. She'd be a lot prettier if he wasn't focusing on the possible future injuries she'll give him. Come on, he nearly broke his wings on the way down, and now humans can't take a joke? Can he catch a break?

He carefully gets his way back to his feet, mindful of blocking his naked self from her with a wing. Holding his palms up to her as what he means to communicate as a deterrent, he grumbles to himself, "Yeah, they sure worship us. Bunny, you liar."

The girl clears her throat pointedly and gives her weapon a readjustment. It's honestly quite scary, even given how little she is. He's not made of much, either, but she's got to be smaller than _Hiccup_, even when he didn't have a leg upon first entering the gates.

"Calm down for a second and let me explain," he says carefully. Her gaze, once resolutely fixed in some sort of panicked anger, now drift stiffly around the contours of his wings as he carefully moves them down. He doesn't know humans really well, but he figures if they're anything like what else he's seen here, looking big probably won't make her feel very comfortable. Trigger some defense mechanism or something. He tucks back his wings, still trying to keep himself covered for her sake.

_"Ma'am," _he says sarcastically, "my name's Jack. And it's bad luck to go ballistic on an angel."

Her face flickers at the registration of the word, and he nods slowly to egg her on that train of realisation.

"…What?" she asks breathlessly, and he releases a chuckle.

"What did you _think _I was?"

She scrunches up her nose for a moment but he notices the lowering of the hanger – just slightly, just limp enough for him to maybe get it out of her hands if he decided in the next few seconds that he'd like to make another stupid decision. Nope. He's got no ideas. He waits for her answer, and when it comes, it's hesitant and a bit dubious. "I thought you were – my mother once had to chase off these boys around Halloween – "

He raises one of the joints of the free wing, tilting the white feathers at her. "These aren't a costume."

"I know that _now,_ and you're – well, you're _naked_," she says through her teeth, cringing. Her toes draw in carefully through the grass, and he just has to laugh.

"Is that a problem?" Whoops, okay, idiocy coming back up for another go: he starts unfolding the wing to taunt her and she gives a little squeak.

"Don't you dare!"

"What, never seen a boy before?" he asks, but complies. She looks too shaken now to do any damage, but he also doesn't want to piss her off. That wouldn't be good news to bring back to the sky.

She takes a little breath, blowing it out in way too long of a sigh for how much she inhaled, and then edges closer to him a fraction. Her eyebrows draw together, her voice puzzled. She looks shockingly more at ease, and he figures she must be so trusting to do that. Even despite the fact that she was beating him up a few minutes ago. "Angels…aren't supposed to be here…_exactly."_

He raises an eyebrow, leaning back on his heels. "You don't make the rules. And if you did, it's not like I would listen."

"Well, what ARE you doing here?"

He points up. "I fell."

And to his surprise, she snorts in the most strangely adorable way, then throws a hand to cover her mouth as giggles begin to bubble through her fingers. Once she has herself under control and he's rolling his eyes, she asks, "Fell?"

"And it hurt."

"I'm sorry, I just always imagined angels as really graceful and then there's – " She gestures to him minutely, swinging her skirt as she thinks of a word. He supposes it's an honest view of hers – it's not like they have an abundance of church-hall paintings depicting lanky, snarky teenage boys who often have flying accidents.

She resigns, "You're not as _scary."_

"You couldn't have realised that before attacking me?" he asks. She sheepishly smiles, and tucks back her hair, golden as the gates. Now that she doesn't have him at gunpoint, he does agree that she is rather beautiful. Kind of young for his 300 years of death, but hey.

"What's your name?" he says.

"Rapunzel."

"Okay, so tell me what you do around here, anyways."

She smiles timidly, offering, "I paint?" like he's supposed to decide it for her.

"There's more than that, come on." Jack laughs loosely, tilting his head at her with an eyebrow cocked. "What is it that human teenagers do, anyways? Party and drink in packs and stuff?"

Her tiny shoulders risk a shrug. The way she pauses for so long, and so shyly, throws up some red flags in his unwary head. He's about to ask some more before –

_"Rapunzel!"_

An oily voice streaks across the lawn like a hoard of rats, and they both look up in equivalent alarm to see a wild-haired woman sweeping out of the back door. Jack readies himself for this lady's response to him, and her gaze definitely turns horrified – but then she hurries down into the grass, waves an arm in his direction, and screeches, "What is all this about, Rapunzel?"

They both turn to see the crater of upturned dirt. Jack blinks. She can't see him?

Rapunzel pulls the hanger to herself, no longer a weapon, and she's obviously struggling for a good excuse. She shoots Jack a confused look and he shrugs right back, clueless also.

The woman huffs and shakes her head, taking Rapunzel sharply by the wrist. "I don't understand how these things always happen when you're around, Rapunzel. Oh, darling, I don't mean to be short with you but _really – "_

And Rapunzel is then pulled off back towards the cottage, fetching the laundry basket on the way. Her green eyes widen at him as they're pulled apart across the yard, and he's only got a crooked grin for her, because _what the fuck just happened?_ The door shuts behind the veil of her blonde hair and the nightmarish lady with a gavel crash. Jack runs a hand across his face in exhaustion.

Well, this is a loophole that was never mentioned to him.

He feels a strong tug to follow her, but instead cleans up the ruined yard the best he can. Not bad for an angel with no gardening experience, he thinks afterwards, but when he decides he should be checking back for Hiccup's mental health, he doesn't want to leave.

It's only later that he figures it out – North's doubtful response is simple but he never dared to ever think of it. It lets him believe a little more in that thing called fate, which matched him with a pair of wings so young in the first place.

"An angel can only be seen by the person they're supposed to be the guardian of."

Well. Huh.

This changes things.


	4. Chapter 4

.prompt.: **'White lips, pale face, breathing in snowflakes'**

.prompt by.: **the-tower-girl on tumblr**

.universe.: **Pre-Tangled**

.a/n.: **A much shorter one! I'm running out of things to upload, I should spend more time writing them :p**

**X **

White lips, pale face, breathing in snowflakes. An echo out of her window, as much a part of the sky as the clouds are. As much a part of outside.

He comes so often she wonders if he's haunting her, but if he is, he's not very good at it. He just hovers outside the stained-glass window of her bedroom, exhaling frost instead of fog, mostly grinning bright and ivory at her and sometimes doing nothing but watching her under a gaze as blue as icebergs. She thinks he might be mute - but she doesn't notice the silence until she can tell he's upset and he won't give her an answer.

She's tried to open the tower window for him (scared, scared, scared as she may be, she's fourteen now Mother and this boy looks like he'll just phase right through her) but whenever she slips from her room to reach it, he vanishes too. It's like he's only her reflection, made of glass and sugar while she is a far less resilient flesh and blood.

Is she frightening him off? Is her mother? She knows he has something to be happy about since much of the time he is smiling at her, and it's a beautiful smile too like every one is his first and he's surprised to have it, so then why won't he just come and see her if he has all this happiness? Isn't that what people want, to share it? That's how she feels. When she's happy she wants to the whole world to know, but this boy restricts himself to watching her through a window.

Maybe he's the spirit of winter. Maybe he's an angel.

He calls himself Jack Frost, but that's all he's ever said.

She just wants to meet him.

One night he has his arms folded on her windowsill, watching her paint, his back arched up in a curve that lets him touch his toes to the glass above his head. Frost spills like crackling liquid silver into patterns that recite entire sonnets from a moon-like glow.

She tries to replicate that pose on her easel, but with every confused pout she emits he contrasts it with a cheeky smirk. To do what she can only describe as show off, he touches one foot to the window, light as a breeze, and from it, frost takes the shape of a young girl at a puzzled stance, hair running long and coiled to the floor.

It's fascinating for her to paint someone new - she and Mother are her only models, and she's long memorized the inches and hues that make them. He's new. He's a boy made from the tears of winter and he glows like spring, and he is the last person she knows she'll ever see.

While he is her last, she doesn't yet know that she is his first.

And in his eyes, there's too much fear between them. She listens to her mother's rules and her imagination is built on the things she is not allowed to know, but when it comes to pursuing them, she is still a little nervous girl. And he has never had anyone see him before - wounds too raw from the abandonment of his god, his life, and himself, and he cannot let another person be added to the list of things that were. As long as she remains on the other side of the glass, perhaps he won't freeze her until she becomes just like everything else. Precious things shatter once he has them.

So he will wait in watch of her - pink lips, porcelain face, fingerprints against the glass, for a time where they're both longing enough to break it.


	5. Chapter 5

.prompt.: **By the light of the moon / likable Lubin**  
**Knocks on the brunette's door / she soon responds**  
**Who's knocking like that?**  
**He then replies / Open your door / for the God of Love!**  
**By the light of the moon / One could barely see**  
**The pen was looked for**  
**The light was looked for**  
**With all that looking / I don't know what was found**  
**But I do know that the door / Was shut behind them.**

.prompt by.: **Alanna / OnlyaPerfectDisaster on here**

.universe.: **Modern AU**

.a/n.: **Nearly put this one up as it's own story. But then I couldn't find a summary.**

**X**

He hasn't been here for a while.

The moon used to be his calling. She met him on the streets in the middle of the night, framed with the pulsing lights of a dance club she'd just snuck out of. Maybe she looked as wired as she felt, clinging on Merida's arm and laughing as free as flames, because he cast her a very long look and a very sly smile.

And nights after, he hung around the same club, and although she never went in again, he looked most exquisite framed in the wet turquoise and green, the white light of the moon pouring across his face. His square jaw, grinning mouth, angled eyes that watched her when she spoke. Slouched against the wall, no excuse of a fake ID on hand. He said he just liked the pounding through the concrete wall, and she leaned up against it with him one night, until she could imagine she was in the club with him in her arms, grinning that grin against her cheek instead of that safe distance away under the moonlight.

He used to show up under her window like a boy from a movie, holding a stolen iPod that glinted scabbed ivory along its cracked screen, his eyes bioluminescent and squinted in all his usual laughter. He cranked up the volume as high as he could and played playlists of songs with words she couldn't hear but he'd sing along to very badly, making her laugh away what the day had done to her and be revitalised under his own personal star. Then they'd talk, him pulling up one of the porch chairs and often plotting ways to sneak in, or saying she could tie her bedsheets like a prison escapee and he could climb up. Her mother hated visitors.

He let her speak. Most of all, he just let her speak, until she laughed or she cried, but out that window she was listened to.

But the moon is in the sky, and he hasn't been around for two weeks.

She touches the end of her pen to her lips, cautious in her word choice when he never was. He usually made her even more spontaneous than usual, but now, she was in charge of weaving a very long rope of figurative bedsheets to who-the-heck-knows-where. She wants to find him, yet what is there to summon the elusive Jack Frost?

She's more worried than she wants to admit.

It's a thunderstorm, pure midnight, framed by the mysterious empty hole of a shadowed moon.

_….._

_You always said you were the prince of trouble, but I always thought you were the prince of bad tact._

_Really, Jack, from when you decided to crash my prom of a school you didn't even attend…to when you decided to wait with me until morning and leave right when I fell asleep, letting me be late for my classes. And I don't think we want to even bring up the kiss, do we?_

_Bad tact, and now, bad timing. Does the empty sky chase you away?_

_I've got to remember the same thing I always remembered when you were gone. The moon never leaves the sky. It's only hidden. So, where are you?_

Thunder crashes outside, trembling through the walls like the music would, once upon a time, when she could sneak out better. Lightning saws across her notepaper, signing a script of the name of that which chased him away. She knows he doesn't have anywhere to stay, and she can only hope he wasn't too late for one of the youth shelters, because he often didn't bother waiting in the lines like he should.

And then the doorbell rings.

She jumps, her pen falling from the desk with a clinking lost in the howl of the wind. The noise rebounds through the walls, crowing, and she can only thank all the gods that her mother is out tonight, like she so often is. New dates. New life, while Rapunzel is condemned to waiting for her own.

The bell rings again. Bang – echoes the tail end of it all the way up the stairwell into her small room.

And it goes again, and again, until she realises every ringing, cut off by another pressing, is playing out a tune from the club. She jumps from her seat, heart crawling up her throat, and runs down the stairs.

The loose shoe mat causes her to screech to a stop by slamming her hands against the glass slats beside the door. Before she can unlatch every single one of the many, many locks and bolts, she sees his own pale hand press back against hers, a ghost to the ebony night. His voice calls through the remains of a cacophony of doorbells – "Open up!"

Laughing, she pulls key from metal and sings, "Who is it?"

"The God of Love!"

She breathlessly flings open the door to see Jack, dark as pitch with no moonlight backing him, silver hair slate-grey under his hood without white to highlight it, teeth flashing dully under the rain.

She smothers an excited scream, but he's pulled her out onto the uncovered porch before she can trap him in a hug. He's soaked, oversized hoodie heavy and freezing, midnight playing along his heels. His blue eyes flicker in the spray of rain like a broken television screen.

"Nice night," he says, and she can only agree.

Jack takes her face in his hands, and pulls her tight against him – nearly kisses her, the barest brushes of his breath on her teeth, but he's intentionally squishing his drenched sleeves against her face so rainwater dribbles off her chin.

It's so cold, alarming contrast to when she takes his face in return and forces him the extra millimeter to her. Under the shower of pelting, violent rain, she kisses him fully, sighing against his lips and every messy error and click of teeth feels too perfectly like Jack. Like surrender so flawless, falling into a daydream real enough to believe in your own fairy tale.

She pulls back when his hands fall to her waist, and smirks his way. "God of Love, sure," she taunts, and spins out of his hold to clutch at his wrist, bring him inside. She wonders for a split second if he even can, given that she's never seen him anywhere but outside, but he jumps over the threshold as eager to get out of the rain as she is.

"You're soaked," she says, slamming shut the door. It locks them in darkness aided only by the glisten of candlelight – the power has been knocked out since the start of the storm. He laughs, pulling off his hood, and then shaking his head wildly like a dog to spatter water all over the walls – she holds up her hands as a shield and shoves him when he tries to burrow his freezing head into her shoulder.

"It's a perk of being a street rat," he answers crisply.

She asks, "Where have you been?"

His eyes follow the contours of the wall – he's only a boy of glowing skin and snowy hair and dark blue electrical currents. She thinks she must vanish completely in the dark. "Now I finally know where _you've_ been. Hiding out on me, Punz?"

"I'm not the one hiding. What about you?" She steps up to him, finds the hem of his hoodie, and starts to pull it up – cold fingers shut on hers.

"Yeesh," he tries to wrestle her off but she's caught on and isn't giving up, "I want the white of my wedding dress to be honest!"

"This needs to dry off, Jackson," Rapunzel giggles back, so finally he leaves her be. He helps her in the most minute way he can as she takes the sweater off, and when it falls limp in her arms she can tell it's weighted immensely with rain. How long did he walk in this storm? She's cold and she only spent moments outside, but then again, she supposes he's used to it.

She grabs a towel from the broom closet down the hall and hangs up his single jacket on the ceiling fan, using a chair for leverage, and puts the towel underneath. He watches, hands in his torn jeans, a smirk on his face.

"You look like you're decorating for Halloween."

"You still haven't answered me," she singsongs instead, jumping weightlessly off of the chair. He catches her about the waist, a ghost of a white tee and hair mussed beyond control.

"About what?"

She ducks out of his hold, her tone light. "Where you've _been."_

"I've been everywhere. I've been downtown and uptown and beyond-town and places of town you shouldn't know exist." He's grinning and he's lying. He always played those stories up, as if it was honorable and wonderful that he has no roads to follow and no one to watch where he stumbles. Perhaps he does it to ease her, because she worries about it all too much. "But you know, there's somewhere I haven't been."

Reality. Reality is one.

"Yes?" she prompts. He leans into her gaze, arm slinking around her shoulders like the Cheshire Cat, his grin its incorporeal taunt.

"Your bedroom."

She's aware she's trying to scowl but he isn't having it. He kisses her shortly, then pulls back and takes her arm, holds it out, opens her palm, and places his wrist in it.

"Lead me. Lead me like I'm in trouble."

"Jackson, you're trouble top to bottom anyways."

"Am I?"

She wants her answer - needs it, really. He can't just tug at her heart for thirteen days and then dodge inquiries like bullets. Matrix bullets. He's too good at it, so good in fact that he's got her torn.

For how happy she is to see him, she wants to hug him forever so he won't have a chance of slipping away again, and she wants him to get another chance to eat, and she wants to kiss him until she sees stars (or alternatively, _he_ sees them, which is always more amusing), and tell him about pointless things just so she can watch his expressions follow her words.

She doesn't want stories from him that will make her upset, and sometimes he has a lot of them.

So she brings him up the stairwell, grabbing another towel to throw over his head and get him to stumble in the momentary blindness. Thunder rumbles again, the flash of lightning preceding it crawling up the panes of her window, but something gets her to stop. The smoked clouds have parted, reaching filmy fingers across a bloated eye of moon.

_ 'It's so bright,'_ she thinks, and she knows it must have called him back here.

While she leads him into her room, he scrubs the towel against his hair, shaking it out into a mess that looks no less like his usual style than when it's dry. When their feet cross from hardwood to carpet, he exhales triumphantly.

"Look at me, guys, I made it to the elusive princess's bed chambers." He strolls through the dark room, observing things he can barely see. The narrow bed, high spilling bookshelves, and writing desk are cast like worn chess pieces, while the candlelight flicks cuts on the painting frames.

She entwines her fingers and his. "Shh," is her soft, concise response, and for once he can obey. "You're too weird today."

"It's the full moon." His voice is lowered. He brings her hands up to his neck, droplets from his hair sliding between their connected palms. "Or it's you."

Giggles flutter on her lips, and he draws her to her toes with another kiss. He's always been a senseless flirt, so much she didn't think at first that he even meant it – but soon she learned every tone was deliberate, every word, all to get something he wants.

His palm strokes up the back of her neck into the choppy flips of her hair, edging the kiss deeper with the chilled coax of his tongue against her bottom lip. His body is frozen, dripping Arctic, yet moves as smoothly and sensually as summer's heat. He somehow manages to melt her too: this boy off the streets invading the realm of a princess.

His hand wanders to her waist, hips, drifts up the hem of her shirt to freeze the shell of her hipbone under his crafty crawling fingers. She cannot shake him off, only give him an enthused tug on his drenched collar - it surprises him enough that he lets go of her (she jumps on the chance to readjust her shirt) but cannot detangle himself from the kiss. Very little can when Rapunzel's brought her excitement sizzling to the playing field.

She's not seductive, she just kisses. She just feels rhythm in his breathing and follows it with her own, unifying, toying with it unintentionally until small apexes are breached and gasps are caught between her teeth. This isn't fairy tales nor her favourite movies, this is Jack Frost, an elusive myth right under her fingertips (and often, she realizes, at her mercy, because he is just a boy younger than her who tries to know the things she knows but no one can imitate a woman like Rapunzel). The kisses last forever while the ceiling's broken open to the sky and moonlight pours in like the wake of an angel carriage, either bringing her to her toes or surrendering for Jack by falling down to sheets.

But right now, she is still bothered.

At the moment his hand casts a frozen, taunting glow onto her rear, she nips at his bottom lip, perhaps too sharply since he shocked her. He's shocked too, and jolts as he retracts.

"What was that for?" he says quietly, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth. She shyly giggles and retreats from his hold, knowing there will be another instant where he'll go after this again. But Jack always stops when told to stop, and Jack has not yet answered her question.

It's brewing in her chest, simmering and spitting. When people make her worry like this she can only get upset - Mother is always gone with no goodbye - yet she's not _allowed_ to be upset. She'll get a simpered, "Stop taking everything so seriously," or "I certainly didn't raise you to be so fragile!"

But she had been scared and worried and now the emotions clash like titans over the wave of ecstasy of moments ago. Doesn't he trust her?

"Something up?" Jack asks. He is a dance of shadows as he spins her along through his observation of the room. He intertwines their fingers, electric eyes concerned.

She stresses, "You're not telling me. Where have you been?"

"You know what _you _haven't told me?" is his return as he tugs on her wrist a little. "How happy you are that I'm out of wherever I was."

"I think that kiss proved my point enough," she breathes. He chuckles lightly, and she's prepared to let him do all the wandering he wants while she forces her inquiry down his throat before it closes off hers, but his fingers dart into the firelight and fold about her letter.

She's got an urge to snatch it from him, yet holds herself back - maybe upon reading it, he'll realize she's serious and she needs to know. Thunder rocks the house again, fed like a bottlenecked stampede through the hall and up to her room, but Jack does not look up. He's begun to read.

There's more that she never got to write, panic smothered in her effort to keep herself level. She doesn't like worrying but she does it too much, and when there is a boy like him, crossing paths with her so sparsely, no home and no family and has never spoken of any other friends he relies on as much as her – she has to worry. She's the only one who will.

He gives the page a little shake, shadows darkening under his stiffened brow. Chemical blue eyes fix on her, lightning creating a gauge of their silhouettes upon the walls.

He's made up of little stolen bits of the universe. Saturn, Jupiter, the remnants of dead stars floating in the nothingness. He doesn't belong anywhere.

She thought she needed someone who was found to help her find herself, but the boy who was just as lost made the searching all the more true.

"What's wrong with telling me?" she asks. He has a terrible answer to give her and they both know it.

He loosely chuckles. "I don't think you want to hear –"

"No, I do." She edges forwards while he does the same around her, circling each other softly.

Rain is spattering the window and blurring the moonlight that trickles in, and Jack carefully steps in it, white skin glowing all the more while he replaces the letter on the table. That parchment could have bled the word 'love', staining him, and the way he runs his thumb up his palm in pensive silence makes her think it must have.

She says, "Let me listen this time."

Shattered screens like the screen of his stolen music, flick up to her. She dreads there being an answer like every other time: he'll tell her it's a long story; he'll keep things from her once again until she doesn't know if Jack's even his name. He'll wait with her until her mother gets back, sympathetic, stroking back her hair and trapping her into crying while she'd rather hear his voice.

He sighs. He gives up.

And holding a silence she feels like he'll break, he nudges shut the door, though neither hear it click.


	6. Chapter 6

.prompt.:** Love is Friendship Set to Music**

.prompt by.: **deaniethebeanie on tumblr**

.universe.:** Hogwarts AU**

.a/n.:** ignoring symbolic worth of quote so I can write dorky dancing stuff. Yup.**

**X**

"Only _you_ would let this happen," Rapunzel mused rather loudly, pointedly keeping the offending boy on the opposite side of the room from her as she meandered around in search. "Only you. Jackson, you're an enigma."

"C'mon, Punz." Jack's tone was teasing as usual. She could feel his plaintive blue eyes on her back but she just wasn't having it. "Are you _seriously_ telling me you didn't find it funny when the first years' saw there wasn't a painting?"

She didn't want to reply in his favour; she swallowed down her admittance of how it was kind of clever to turn the Fat Lady's painting into a tundra of ice, therefore scaring the poor acrylic woman to the Egyptian desert. The farce had originally been to prank Merida, but countless other kids had reached it first. "I don't think it was worth all this." Rapunzel gestured at the potion ingredient room they were ordered to clean out and organize by hand. She didn't usually have problems with cleaning, but when a lot of the ingredients consisted of dead reptiles that reminded her a lot of Pascal, she got the shivers at everything she touched.

"This is only a punishment if you make it one - isn't that what you told me when _somebody_ snuck us out to see the Thestrals?_"_ Jack pointedly said.

"Jackson, this is different."

"How's that?"

Rapunzel frowned at the shelf, giving it a particularly hard scrubbing from the matted rag. Jack loved trouble. She might even say that he loved detention. Because all it was to him was a few hours of his time (in which he would normally just be creating more trouble) and a boosted reputation. _He_ didn't get a bundle of capricious Howlers with very underhanded promises every time he got punished.

Like he could read her mind (it often seemed like he was very proficient at such a thing), Jack huffed and said, "You're scared of what your mom's gonna do?"

She brushed away some splinters of wood. "Am I really that predictable?"

His footsteps preceded the inevitable entry of him into her personal space - he ducked between her arms on the shelf so she unintentionally had him trapped. He smirked down at her.

"Punzie, Punzie, Punzie," chided Jack, shaking his head.

"And we were just generally being disrespectful to the Fat L - " Rapunzel tried to add, but Jack wasn't impacted. He spoke, teasingly running his fingers like spiders up her bare forearms which, she realized, were still pinned beside his shoulders. She quickly dropped them.

"Do I really have to tell you how much your mom's rules matter? Or do you need a music montage for it to sink in? Because I can do that."

"No, no, definitely not." She suddenly could not help bursting out with traitorous giggling at the thought, so Jack tilted his smile at her and said, "Good. Now stop being a drama queen, Punz."

"Yes, _Jackie,"_ she emphasized tauntingly, and turned her back on him to proceed towards a different shelf entirely. He often had a lot to say about her mom, it was true. And a lot of it was right, too. But he wasn't the one living with her, so often she thought he didn't quite have all that much right to speak.

He called, "Hey!"

She whipped around just in time - he had tossed a jar at her. She just managed to catch it in her fumbling hands, and when she realized what was in it, gave a squeak and threw it back.

Jack promptly landed the jar of newt feet on the shelf, but not with the accuracy skill he kept swearing he had whenever he lost in Quidditch try-outs - a wave of his previously concealed wand swept it neatly into the row. Rapunzel's eyes grew huge and she pointed at it.

"You were supposed to confiscate that for our detention!" she exclaimed. Jack flipped it in his fingers, looking at it in faux surprise

"And how did it get back here?"

Jack observed the room with a gleam in his eye that she knew immediately meant duck-and-cover - Jack was hatching a plan. The amount of things he could do in an enclosed space with hundreds of strange (and gross) objects at his disposal made Rapunzel immediately very concerned.

Jack informed her happily, "You know, either way, we're stuck in here and your mom's gonna be mad."

"What are you plotting, Jack?" she asked critically, but couldn't help curiosity. Curiosity that just as loudly told her to use him as a human shield against his own schemes.

"Nothing! Nothing." He held up a hand to her, chuckling. "Just, it's quiet in here, don't you think?"

He didn't give her an instant to ready her bearings before suddenly a racket picked up - the jars first began it, clanking against each other and the walls of the shelves with an impressively deafeningly cacophony. She wondered what on earth he was trying to do when suddenly the pewter cauldrons began a bought of heavy percussion and she realized he was very badly making music.

He leaned up against the wall, waving his wand randomly like a spastic conductor's baton, and pinning her with an innocent smirk.

She found herself giving one back, and cupping her hands over her ears to dull the noise. She called out through a laugh, "No, really, this improves the acoustics," at his mock-hurt expression. The clamour just grew in rebuttal - thundercracks and the unbearable scraping of glass against gravel, metal ringing tinny and erratically through the undersized dungeon room. She felt worried at how very easily this din would allow Pitch to catch them, but she, as usual, had to commend Jack's originality.

Jack noticed her reaction, finally, and to her surprise, pulled another wand out of his robes. It was light burgundy, slim - and hers.

"Are you a vanishing cabinet or something?" she exclaimed as he tossed it to her. It felt illicit and wrong in her fingers, but it was such a Jack-esque taunt. Tempting and completely, completely against the rules, much like everything else about him.

But Jack was not only good at making a head-splitting racket. He was convincing, somehow, and she figured that a Howler couldn't be louder than this.

With a wave of her wand she rejected Jack's spell and the objects settled calmly, the remnants of whatever song he was trying so hard to _not _follow fading in the room like smoke. Rapunzel gave him a proud smile - then the articles began to stir again, becoming instruments as she concentrated on her proficient knowledge in music. She was limited enough for the tune to grow a little off-kilter and vibrate a little too thinly, but skilled enough for it to actually be comprehensible. It was lively but contained, spirited but under control.

Jack pointed at her. "Not bad." She curtseyed shortly, giggling. "See, now we've got working-music."

She picked up a jar (of swamp water; okay, not so gross _this_ time), yet it continued dancing in her palm, reaching for a song-mate that was no longer there. She frowned at it and Jack suddenly swept up to her side, also giving it a quizzical look.

She started to lift her wand to take the spell off of the single jar so she could clean it, but Jack had another suggestion. He replaced it on the shelf, grinning a far too flirty grin for her tastes - or for her to remain presentable in front of him and his inevitable teasing.

"I guess we don't have to be _working,_ I mean, if it doesn't want to cooperate." Jack proceeded to take her wrists and pull her from the wall - she knew he didn't care one iota about the risk of them getting caught, and he never _had_ cared. And it seemed like that state of mind was a deflection - he could probably shout in a room full of professors who detested him: "We are not getting caught if I can help it!" and, well, they _wouldn't_ get caught. If she had magic hair, then he had a spell of invisibility whenever he was up to mischief.

She knew what he was planning on doing, but she decided to throw him for a bit of a loop by pouncing on it first, and doing it far differently than he would. Rapunzel took one hand in hers, and put the other on his shoulder, and shoved him back a step in time with the music. He stumbled - then, catching on, he smirked and dryly laughed at her, giving her waist a short squeeze. And pushing back. Her bare feet slid half a step, but she had been far more ready than he was and so she managed to turn it into the first real movement of their dance.

She knew way more than him, and he was reduced to matching her measurement of beats - she had him tangled in a slow stroll until her bare feet egged for more and she gave a flick of her wand over his shoulder. The music sprung up in uproarious cheer; Jack shot her a grin. _This,_ he could catch up with.

Too eager, they both tried to tug the other closer at the same apex of instruments - it resulted in Rapunzel's head smacking his jaw. She giggled timidly; in vengeance he spun her around, yanking her into the whirlwind of music that was unintentionally picking up intensity around them. It took no time before they'd reduced the walls to blurs of ebony, their only focus the other's form – they were practically on their toes to keep the wild dance alight.

There was no sense to the dance, only flowing in and through a river of no trajectory, but still Jack seemed to be spun up in it, getting cocky in skills he doesn't possess. He twirled her, eyes bewitchingly azure and flashing in the dim light of the dungeon; all she could do in return was laugh at him. Rapunzel held up her arm and he ducked under, treating her to a curtsey before skipping back into her arms.

She'd apparently managed to stick the spell rather well, because it kept going even as Jack whirled her out of his arms and back in, the room reduced to a faint eerie glow of flashing glass: their audience as they dissolved into breathless laughter.

Finally Jack gave too hard of a stumble and she grasped his hand hard to bring him to his feet. He grinned down at her, his normally so pale skin lightly flushed, and she wondered just how long they'd been dancing.

"Well, that's one way to get things done," Jack snickered as he idly pushed back a stray lock of her blonde hair. It was stubborn and fell right back, but she still smiled at him for it.

She giggled ecstatically through a beam, squeezing his fingers. She did love dancing and never had he let her share it with him, but now that he did she just wanted to do it all over again. Cheeky compliments couldn't get out her throat while he caught his breath that close to her, his chest swelling rhythmically against hers. They mulled in equal elation for a moment, Jack shockingly becoming wordless while his hands eased in hers – and then he stepped back, cleared his throat, and with his sudden retraction her music snapped to mute.

Shaking back her hair, Rapunzel took out her wand. She lied it dead in her palm while holding out her other hand imploringly towards Jack – he feigned innocence before she tilted up an eyebrow and said, "I think we could dance for Pitch so he won't notice we got nothing done."

Jack's eyes squint slightly with a grin, answering rather confidently as he placed his wand next to hers, "I knew I'd be able to convince you."


	7. Chapter 7

.prompt.: **Flynn begins doubting to marry Punz because of Pitch's nightmares. The wedding ends in a disaster her being left at the altar and when Jack visits after that Punzie blames him, that he could have prevented all this.**

.prompt by.: **Anon**

.universe.:** Post-Tangled**

**.a/n.: IMPORTANT! It came to my attention recently that the dialogue here is from Doctor Who. Keep in mind, the dialogue was provided in the prompt, I just removed it to avoid clotting up this intro here, and spoiling it.**

**X**

She's locked him out. And he knows he has to respect that.

Rapunzel is behind the door, and he wishes he could hear celebratory, cheerful voices of her and her mother, perhaps, a maid, _someone_ with her – he wants to know there are voices slipping through the margins like champagne-bubbling honey. Happy. He can smell the chamomile, the lace, the flowers framing her and her mirror like an altar.

She's in a wedding dress he can only imagine the beauty of, enhanced just by being on her - silky and virginal white, sparkling more purely than even the snow, because he's seen the snow so much, and this is a once in a lifetime thing. He imagines her walking down the aisle, unable to hold in her excitement as always - fizzing and popping with enthused 'I do's and kissing Eugene senseless.

…He has to respect her. He can't open the door.

Rapunzel has shot down his attempts over and over - "Are you _sure _I'm not allowed to see you before the wedding?" "Certain!" "I'm not even the groom, Punz!" "That doesn't matter. It's still bad luck." She picked up that paranoia from her parents, doubtlessly, because he can remember a time where she would be fine walking in public in her undergarments and she'd never detect the difference. He also remembers when she believed in him and in true love.

It's not before the wedding though, anymore.

Jack hovers near the doorway, breathing himself into a soft rhythm that takes over his mind, silences the urge to shove open the door, laugh with her like usual, hold her hands, tell her what he knows. Ruin everything, like he always seems to do.

The church had greeted her, stunning in golds, ivories, and rosy pinks, standing tall in its imposing threats when it should have been bowing to her. Everyone should have been. She was their new princess and this was the happiest day of her life - she would weave the fate of new promises with him, matching rhythms in equal honesty and happiness and good fortune. Instead all she heard was, "I can't. I'm sorry, I - I can't."

He always knew Eugene was a runner.

On the other side of the door, Rapunzel has started to cry. He can feel his own heart breaking mutely for her, like he is frozen in time with her again. Once it was in a tower that never changed and never offered her anything, and now it's across the threshold of a castle bedroom, her veil spilled like shattered glass around her.

He has - …He can't respect this anymore.

He pushes through the door and Rapunzel is seated, shaking, at her bureau, a maid taking the veil out of her short hair – a permanent memory of him – while her back facing him illustrates the mirror reflection of emerald eyes stained with diamond tears. She isn't looking at the maid at all, and they aren't talking, a sure sign that something is wrong.

Of course it's wrong. Everything's wrong.

"Punz," he says carefully, creeping forwards and edging shut the door as fast but as quietly as he can - she had the door closed in the first place for a reason. At his voice, her head turns up slightly until he can see her clearly in the mirror. Her fingers jerk tighter around her torso, but then she stands up, gaze removing its cautious, sedentary attachment to Jack's.

She whispers to the maiden, her voice shaking around sobs she's compressing, "Can I - can I be left alone? I'll come down later, just…"

The woman has not had enough time to learn the princess's mannerisms. She carefully pulls away, nodding - she doesn't know if Rapunzel means yes when she says no or when leave really means leave, so she takes the easy way and listens to the surface.

The woman passes right through Jack, but she cannot make him feel any more hollow than he already does.

Alone, Rapunzel is in his full view now; a real angel in her wedding dress, laced sleeves flirting across her shoulders. Her veil, abandoned on the bureau, becomes a snowy, wingless pathway of things she misses and things she lost. He's caught in the vision of her tiny bare feet pressing prints across the fabric towards him, and only sees just how hard she's crying when she swings a punch into his chest.

They both hiss in pain, his breath caught - she'd gotten him right in his sternum, and it's not like there's much separating her delicate knuckles from a wall of bone. She pulls her hand back, cradling it near her hip. The tears in her eyes are not freshly sprung, but the pain lets them trickle further down her cheeks.

She doesn't know how to punch. Last he heard, the grandest event of her physical prowess was knocking Eugene out cold with a frying pan, without the slightest idea that she could have murdered him in the process.

Wouldn't things have ended up so funnily different if she did?

He breathes, knotting the fabric of his dark vest in his hands over where she hit him, "I hope you didn't greet your maid that way."

She isn't having any of his ironic, uncomfortable humour right now. And he regrets bringing it out into the open.

He watches her frown tug furiously at her lips, her breathing skip as she hunts for words, and he wonders if somewhere in there hides an apology. He's more hoping for screaming. Fury. Blame on Eugene.

"Where have you been?" she snarls instead.

To that, there isn't a good answer. He's busy, they both know – it comes with being a winter spirit, but maybe missing her wedding was pushing his excuse.

He didn't _mean_ to.

He just didn't want to have to be there. Now he wishes he was so he could have changed Eugene's mind, because no matter how much he didn't want them to be together for as long as vows promise, he can take the tears spilling silver down her face even less.

He steps closer to her, hesitating around his words. "Punz, I'm – ."

"Where have you _been?"_ Her green eyes are fiercely aflame, a way only a girl so pretty and tiny can display. She might as well just hit him again. He watches the tears clot in her eyelashes as she snaps, "Every time – _every time_ you've asked I have been there for you!"

And she was. She saved him from the furthest depths of winter that he could have drowned himself in, and instead of thankful, she now has him feeling a twisted knife of guilt.

"I tried – I'm here _now – "_

"Where were you when I needed you?!"

He blanks out to silence, just listening to her, the dummy for the bullets he's waiting for her to let herself start shooting full-out. She deserves to.

He wanted her to be happy. He wanted her to smile, and to make the ring glitter in his face, reflect the sapphire of his eyes, until he's memorized the diamond's exact cut and when he pushes it away it can be seen as a normal gesture between friends and not a jealous reaction.

He wishes he could back things up, change his own mind, have the ability to reflect a little harder and understand her a little more.

Jack breathes, reaching out a cautious hand – halfway, so if she wants his comfort she can fall into his range, and if she doesn't it's a defense against further assaults from her – "I couldn't have prevented this."

She mirrors his raised hand but with vehemence – her breathing skips and jolts and tears out her throat with a keening whine, backing up a single furious whisper, "You could have _tried!"_

He flinches in expectance for her punch, thinking it strange and heartbreaking of her to be so far gone into sorrow that she'd act like this towards him, but she's beyond that – her dress is cold and her grip shattering as she collapses into his automatic embrace. Her blaming him hurts more than he'll let himself accept, yet he allows her to bury her head into his shoulder, clutch her fingers in his shirt, brittle and so close to breaking.

He buffers her trembling like a frail stormcloud deterring thunder, rain dampening his shirt, rush of wind pulses tightening her hands where they clasp at the back of his neck. He's never felt her so upset and it kills him – he could easily let her become lightning instead and splinter him: he feels terrible enough, weak enough. He doesn't understand how one person can ruin her fierce, summery, powerful heart so easily, just by turning tail and vanishing into the woods.

"I'm sorry I wasn't there," is all he can struggle out. She's right. He's never where he should be.

She shakes her head, nails digging in further; although she says nothing he knows it's supposed to get him to shut up. Another boy's apologies isn't what she should need right now, or even have to listen to at all.

He wishes he could say he's always been wrong except for _now,_ as she lets him take her tears and forces his hand around the bullet Eugene has punctured her with, her silence telling him to take it out and not let a single drop of blood hit the ground. But he isn't sure he's needed now as much as he is someone easy to blame and hold.

He runs a hand through her hair, pulling her closer – to everyone else's eyes she is still alone, she is crying alone, the girl left behind.

He's not sure if he can fix her.


	8. Chapter 8

.prompt.: **Can I maybe request a Jackunzel Drabble with these lyrics? I'll never forget those eyes, that beautiful smile/I still remember the way you said "good-bye"/No matter how hard I try I can't forget about/Beautiful Girl/On top of the world/Don't fall down/Because an angel/Should never touch ground/Here I lay, I drift away, you come in and lay beside me/It's got to be a memory that feels so real but just beyond me/Mesmerized, In you/I find what I had was unrealized but/Emptiness settles in as I awake**

.prompt by.: **Anon**

.universe.:** Modern (save Jack, who is still a spirit)**

.a/n.:** Just realized how weird this universe is. This one has the request for a sequel too, which I may do.**

**X**

Jack walks in between Merida and Hiccup, creating an uncomfortable rift between them to the eyes of crowd. Exes, maybe they would think. Awkward friends, brought together by the death of their best friend, unsure how close is too close and how far will make them unable to hold themselves together. In reality, though, Jack holds Merida's hand where it presses against her side, and Hiccup is trying to make enough awkward conversation for the both of them.

He would rather not be between them. The closeness suffocates him. He has spent a decade with these kids and right now he can't stand them - he can't stand the mortality he knows they still wear. He can't stand how easily Merida cries here, when he always knew her as a temerity to rival him. Hiccup has changed and won't shut up, his mother slipping in and out of the subject like fog on a windowpane, as if he can get them through this for once.

Rapunzel's changed, too. Rapunzel's dead.

Jack leads them both through the church doorway, but once empty pews come into view, he slides his hand out of Merida's with enough delicacy to, it seems, make her automatically find a continuation of solace in Hiccup's palm. The boy turns to watch Jack's retreat - his grey-green eyes are stung with pink yet are dully alert, creasing in confusion as Jack softly levitates.

Hiccup murmurs, "Jack, don't run."

Merida turns around, too. She asks the same thing in a silence, edgy, maybe even _mad _because they know him and they know he likes to vanish, but he doesn't have a chance to answer before they're interrupted.

A mammoth, stocky man reaches them. He has red hair in a frizz, a prosthetic foot that he has trouble balancing on, and Merida in his enormous embrace.

Jack watches the way she shudders and hugs her dad back. He looks at Hiccup - his voice is quiet and scratched, the first time he's properly used it for hours: "I'll be with you guys. I promise."

Hiccup receives a squeeze of the shoulder from Merida's dad, but before he follows them both to the pew behind the rest of Merida's family, he nods at Jack. He's getting his father's hard attitude.

"Save me a seat," Jack comments weakly. It isn't funny. Levity isn't funny. It kind of feels like nothing will ever be funny again.

He soars up to the ceiling of the church, flower-fragrant air flushing past his skin in a chaste reminder of her. He recalls the smell of her, the touch of her skin, the liquid gold of her passion. She was the strongest at conversation - despite being new at English, she could build and build and build just with her words, a creation better than what he can make of himself - but her silence was a power he now cowers in the presence of.

He's in a cathedral full of people and those who matter most can see him, but he's never felt quite so lost. She has severed whatever words or lack of words held them together; now it feels as if he can't recall what they had in common and what he's missing.

She's a numb, empty hole in his reality, in his past, in his future.

He stops at the casket – flowers in bundles, cut crisp and petals reflecting clean ghastly ivory. He feels apprehension brush his skin like a trembling breeze, but pushes forwards.

Rapunzel lies there with her eyes closed and her hands over her heart as if to buffer the noise of it, hold it inside. She did that sometimes when she was excited – granted, not as calmly as this, but she'd clutch her fists at her chest and laugh about the hyperactivity of her heart. Giggling strangely until Merida realised it wasn't a joke and the group had to turn themselves off so she could calm down which sometimes took forever. Once, when her heart rate picked up like a stampede for no apparent reason, Jack didn't let her cover it up. He carefully took her hands away and she let him listen, his breath ghosting over her skin, her heart pounding like a terrified bird.

Too much life. She was one girl, compressed into a tiny bubbly body who could change the world with the power of a million people. A million different people inside of her, splitting spirits, looking through her eyes, seeing reality how she saw it. Maybe that's why he felt so loved when he was with her.

He doesn't get how all of that is gone. It has to go somewhere. She can't just vanish.

Her eyelids begin to flicker.

Jack jolts, realising his hand was reaching out to her – it snaps back from her cheek, hits the casket wall, but she doesn't seem to hear. Ebony lashes flutter slow, nakedly, open; the first sight of her eyes is a shot that twists in his chest.

"Rapunzel?" he breathes. He's scared for her answer – he's scared to move, like it will snap him out of this fantasy. Her hands slip away from herself. She lifts herself up, glancing in confusion at her light pink dress, at her tomb.

She looks over at him, and he knows it's not a fantasy.

She touches her hands back down to the silk sheets, and immediately, light seems to glisten from her palms – it seeps up through the glossed oak, then touches at the dark dirt in the pots that surround her bed.

The white turns purple, baby blue, pink as grapefruit, soft as watercolour, sunshine's yellow.

She blinks slowly at it, puzzled. And then he sees her luminous, awestruck, familiar smile curving up her naturally glossed lips, and for once it feels like it's_ his_ heart pounding for the both of them.

"Rapunzel!" he breathes, grinning – he reaches forwards, to help her out and spin her around, have her with him again, of course. He sees her sitting up. And faintly, he sees her lying on the pillows, hands crossed over her heart, the sunrise streaking white across her empty face.

She smiles gently at him. "I'm sorry…Who are you?"


	9. Chapter 9

.prompt.: **Sequel to the previous chapter!**

.prompt by.:** icantnotwaitforyou**

.universe.: **Modern...thing?**

.a/n.: **This is either a sign that I am back to writing for this fandom, or just a false alarm?**

**This takes place a few long, sleepless days after the funeral.**

**(Also, don't talk to me about teeth.)**

**X**

He's never been scared of not having forever.

Made of sapphire and snow, the endless cycle of the earth and time, he can been tugged into a million pieces but will always find his home.

Until now. He isn't sure where it is, anymore.

They made a monument for her, fabricated out of the tomb and mosaic shards, polished stones and someone else's prayers. He guesses the image in it is supposed to symbolise something, but it just looks like someone spilled paint to him.

"That's pretty," Rapunzel comments from where she strolls beside him. Her hands are behind her back, hidden behind her cascading blonde hair – she'd decorated it with little decals of flowers that she was, day by day, learning to properly grow from thin air.

She used to decorate her hair like that too, when she was alive.

"Gotta be. They've been working on it forever," Jack says, and flicks up a swirl of a breeze that toys with the leaves scattered on the cemetery pathway.

"Really? Wow, they must h – … That's so kind of them." Rapunzel tucks a slipping lock of blonde behind her ear, and gives Jack a tug on the sleeve to guide him over with her. Even if no one can see her or feel her, she skips around the people crouched at the tomb, making sure to hold her skirt against her legs so it doesn't hit anyone. Jack soars inches overhead until he lands on the other side of the monument, watching her.

Curious as always, she leans around, and her green eyes are the colour of the jewels keyed into the corners. "And they thought I'd never see it, huh? How sweet…" Her voice fades off as she touches the stone, tentatively like she's scared she'll pass right through it. "They must have really liked me."

"Loved you. Yeah." Jack clears his throat, and gives an idle glance around so he won't have to watch her begin to spring spontaneous flowers in the grass around the tombstone. Children seated there give gasps and point.

And Jack is glad he looked up. In the distance coming down the path is the bright red alarm of Merida, Hiccup at her side.

He still hasn't explained to them that Rapunzel is here.

He doesn't want to torture them like that.

"Hey, hey," he says, and drifts up into the air to land on the stone. A tap of his staff against the crown of her head gets her to glance up – her eyes are an even purer green now. "We should go."

"Why?"

"Still got some lessons to go through, pupil of mine."

She giggles. It sounds so solid and real, and that's nearly sobering. If she wasn't supposed to be in casket somewhere, it would make him a lot happier. She grabs onto the shepherd's crook like a climbing rope and he backs up until he's walking on air and she's atop the tombstone. Damn her smile.

Jack takes her around the waist, and kicks off.

**X**

She's the spirit of spring, he guesses, hence the flowers, and therefore she's got a _little_ bit of control over the air – not like him, the spirit of nose-nipping gales and cheek-freezing gusts, but she can spin up tiny brushes of warm sea-salt breeze to make flowers dance and help the airborne seeds find new homes.

So bringing her to a flower field is kind of a load of chaos.

Especially since he misjudged the plants (he's Jack _Frost_, there's a reason plants don't usually survive in winter) and they're actually _dandelions_.

Rapunzel is running in the fray, her arms held out, wildly ecstatic laughter on her lips. She's kicking up the fluffy puffballs of seeds without damaging any of them, and the minor control over wind that she has just makes a bigger flurry of the weeds. She's a frail blonde tornado and she's just so damned happy about it that he has to let slip a smirk. It's easy to forget who she really isn't when she looks like this.

Or maybe it's just reassuring to know that she can do this as much as she wants without having a heart attack…or whatever it was that killed her.

He calls from where he's lounging in a tree near the perimeter, "I thought spring was about the flowers!"

"It is!" she yells back, even though he knows she doesn't know that. He remembers waking up as Jack Frost three hundred years ago and, after all the fun and invention of making a winter, had to watch it all shrink and melt before his eyes. Heartbreaking. For a teenage boy, that is. So she must not know much about the world either, and instead has to learn it from experience, mistakes, accidentally prompting folktales about mysterious seasonal curses, and bullshit like that.

He yells, "Those are weeds!"

Rapunzel twirls and swings her arms to billow up a cloud of dandelion seeds. He can see her grin from all the way over here. "They're all plants, Jack; they're all a part of it!"

"You're just saying that because you don't know any better," he taunts.

"Are you warning me out of experience, Jackie?"

The nickname twists his gut, but he talks back anyways: "I never made any mistakes, rookie!"

Jack sees the luminescent flash of her smile – pink, glowing, perfect. She's laughing at him, and she gives another spin –

And then collapses.

Jack is immediately on the scene, ripping through the air towards her with his unbeating heart making a senseless racket in his throat, powder and petals whipping into his face.

He sees her lying in the grass. Her arms are splayed. And she still laughs.

Her green eyes drift onto his of blue, and she blows a train of tickling dandelion puffs at him. They twirl around his wrists while she watches her own talent with wide eyes.

He kicks a flurry of sudden snow at her instead. As if he's kidding. "You freaked me out, stupid."

Rapunzel gasps, the arch of shock in her eyebrows honest. "I didn't mean to! I'm sorry!"

"It's fine." Jack smirks crookedly. "Now I know never to trust you."

She responds with another airy laugh, and then inches over in the weeds and touches her hand to the space beside her – with pursed lips and a look of searing concentration, he watches while, in an arc coming from her fingers, she makes the plants all lean down and away.

Satisfied, she pats the spot. "Come on, Jack."

He shrugs at her and sits down beside where she lays. Rapunzel smiles warmly up at him, but he can see the worry before it even fully creeps over her face. He knows her too well for her to hide things. Knew her.

"What's up?" he asks although dreading the answer.

She touches at her cheek and stares up into the blue, blue sky. Her voice is small. "You couldn't have gotten it perfect the first time."

"What?"

"With…you know. Being a spirit. Right? You're tricking me."

Jack leans back and lets his staff leave his hands. He says, "Nah, not lying at all."

This time it's her that asks, "What?" but it's so shallow it stings him and he's sorry for trying this in the first place. She's still Rapunzel – still crafty, still sweet, still clever, but she isn't used to him and his shit.

He hurriedly amends, "Okay, maybe a little. There were a few kids I might have accidentally tripped, or buried, or snowed in their houses." She raises a brow. "Okay, fine, lots of houses I snowed in. I didn't know snow was that heavy!"

Rapunzel gasps again, but it breaks off into giggles. "Oh, Jack!" She sits up with an arm supporting her in the grass, hair tossed back over her shoulder. She leans into him to listen.

And he keeps going. Maybe she doesn't bring life into just topiary at a touch. "This one time way back – right, okay, I didn't really get when winter was supposed to end, or if it was supposed to at all. So I'm just there trying to cover up trees when the sun comes up and out of _nowhere_, everything starts melting! All my snowmen and artsy frost and it's all vanishing."

"What did you do?"

"I tried to fix it, duh! Running here and there," he lifts his arm to mime the wielding of his staff, "trying to refreeze ponds and cover up the dirt again, but it wouldn't stop! I thought the Man in the Moon had it out for me and I was getting uncrowned or something!"

Rapunzel tilts her head his direction and laughs the sweetest sound he's heard from her in a while – it isn't an excited laughter, an overwhelmed laughter, but just a close amiable giggle that hangs off his every word. It's the biggest compliment.

Enthused, he opens his mouth to tell her more –

About the time he tried the same thing when having a late-year snowball fight with Merida and Hiccup and _her_, but he stops.

He can feel her eyes on him, eager and inquisitive: he just melts into a chuckle instead to deter it, but he knows that his laughter is coming from a memory they don't share anymore. He says, "So you're not the only one who's gonna be confused. You're just lucky I'm here."

"I am! And I'm thankful."

"Yeah."

"We have to follow each other every year, Jack." She lifts her chin to the sun and hums as she thinks. The sound tweaks up at the end. That means she's being mischievous again. "Sooo, I'm the one who leads."

No different than usual. He snorts a laugh. "I'm still older than you; don't let it get to your head."

"Jack, who are Summer and Autumn?"

Now it's his turn to be thoughtful. He can feel her eyes on him while he ponders, but no answers come up beyond his unwavering subconscious attention on the invisible pulse of her new heart, and his wondering is obstructed with the thought that she doesn't even know what happened with the old one.

That it killed her.

He shrugs. "Nah. I went three hundred years with no other seasons, so there's a lot of time to wait."

"Oh. That's a shame…I wanted to meet some new people. I mean, I really like you, but if I have forever…"

Jack nods. She's so lucky that he was there at her casket. "I gotcha."

She asks, "Do you have any friends, Jack?"

The wrong question. He sucks in a breath – _Merida, Hiccup, they were your friends too, you were the beginning for them and for me and not the epilogue like now, not the accident that I'm letting them cry over_ – and lets it go.

Also an accident.

Rapunzel squeaks as with his tension comes a breeze of frigid wind that soars over her bare feet while they curl, and into the weeds before them. They buckle under the sudden weight of frost.

"Shit." He grits his teeth. "Sorry."

"It's okay! It's okay." Rapunzel nervously laughs, and he nearly jolts when she suddenly squeezes his hand – she's as warm as always – while with the other fingers she rolls a revitalizing breeze through the grass. The plants spring back to life, arching to the sun once again.

She giggles nervously. "I'm sorry for that too! Aheh… Jack?"

"What?" She's looking directly at him like she's never heard of a thing called shyness.

Her green eyes are the wrong shade, not the ones he memorized so clearly, but it's her. No magic, no missed memories, nothing can make him try and convince himself otherwise.

It's Rapunzel and she's forgotten him and he still loves her no matter what.

She whispers, "I'm your friend now. And you're mine. We'll be okay, won't we?"

He doesn't have enough words left so he just says, "Yeah."

**X**

Rapunzel's changing. She's getting a stronger hold on her power and the potential to use it for good – and also for pranking. She's decorating the trees fuller than they ever have been before, until they're bowing around her and Jack's heads while they sit beneath and watch the people go by. Their teasing comments are secret. Her happiness isn't. The world glows bright and beautiful when she smiles at him, and not just from the flowers that sprout around her feet.

Jack is perennial and invisible. Jack is as frozen as his powers.

He finds Merida and Hiccup one day – he hides from view and listens as they sit on the park bench, Merida with her knees up and feet in Hiccup's lap while he passes her boxed-up food they just bought from the mini-mart.

He watches her face sour.

He listens to her shut the box slowly, gaze over the empty playground – her eyes hesitate on the jungle gym and Hiccup's stray in the same direction.

"Remember her climbing on those? Racing us?"

"You always _nearly_ won," Hiccup says. He's smirking softly.

"Yep. I swore I'd beat her but she was a little monkey."

"I remember you telling her that. Or, well, yelling it at her. And she wouldn't leave you alone about it – "

"Making stupid chimpanzee noises from the top of that thing when she thought she was being funny."

_"I_ found it pretty funny."

"Of course you did. Jack did too. He made her keep doing it."

They both pause for a long moment. Jack ducks down lower in the leaves, aptly hidden by how thick they are.

Hiccup sighs. He says in a light voice, "Out of those stories, I really remember her helping you up. Here, and when you used to laugh yourself sick and fall off the couch – "

Merida punches his shoulder lightly. "Shut it about that."

Another halt.

She says, "I remember her helping me up at the graduation ceremony. That one wasn't very funny."

"She told you to be careful in those shoes."

"She always knew what was best and she _knew_ she knew it."

"But she was always way too nice about it. That…that was Rapunzel."

Merida groans and lowers her head to her knees – Hiccup is startled for a second, but it's a fraction of how he used to react. He's acclimated to it. Jack cringes.

Merida mumbles, "Everything reminds me of her. I'm so tired of it, Hic. I don't like having incomplete stories."

Hiccup nibbles his lip for a millisecond. He takes her hand, subtly and between the back and seat of the park bench like it's being hidden.

And she snarls, "I can't do shit like this anymore. Not without Rapunzel. Not without Jack."

Hiccup doesn't say anything.

"How can he just leave us _now?"_

"You know how he felt about her…"

"That isn't an excuse for him!" Merida jerks her head up and her teeth are grit – her grimace is twisted and tearful. "He should be _with_ us! He should be helping us! Not sneaking around – I see him sometimes, don't you? He just never talks or gets close enough like he doesn't want to know it's us."

She suddenly looks around – Jack swears under his breath and huddles until he's even smaller in the tree, feeling so stupid and feeling so numb at the same time, like the only emotions that can reach him now are pointless ones that try and remind him that he's really still on earth.

And Merida snaps, "If he's going to do that, he may as well leave for good. If the only thing about us that mattered to him was Rapunzel, then he shouldn't have to deal with us anymore at all."

Hiccup is too late in trying to calm her. She's done her damage. Jack crouches until they're both looking at each other, impenetrable by his whisper through the wind, and then he's gone.

**X**

Newly born silence, even after 300 years of it, is somehow inviting.

After all, he'd watched the world grow and sprawl until the trees shivered with the noise of humanity, and then he'd fallen into it and into the lives of those three teenagers, and he forgot what it was like to be alone.

It's nice. He's better at it.

Jack sits at the very tip of the rock face, crouched into calf-deep snow but he just hovers atop it, the sticky flakes clinging to his feet but not daring to let him sink. He'd only aimed to take a breather here, where the air was as frosty as his skin and he could do whatever destruction he needed without hurting anything – but he's now watching the sun fold beneath the earth and mountains, casting a bloody glow over his shoulders.

He doesn't ever really mean to be such a bundle of problems, but it just…happens.

He misses her, but he never wanted it to be at the expense of his friends, or of himself. Was there a certain band of equipment you needed to battle this kind of stuff? Like Merida's security and her ease in just…screaming when she needed to, or like Hiccup's level-headed productivity with all his distress? And what did Jack have? – a cleverly planted quip and his undeniable talent at abandoning the problem.

Jack groans into his arms and crushes his eyes shut.

Even if he wanted to – if he could – confront what was wrong, what could he _do?_ Reteach himself to know her, and make his best friends go through the exact same torture while Rapunzel…while she was just like him and she would know she was the reason they all fell apart, while she couldn't do anything about it.

…Would he dare tell her?

"Jack?"

He jumps – whirls around with the snow following him in a pock-marked shield as he follows the undoubtedly familiar voice.

Rapunzel stands there, holding herself tightly, a cloak of knotted weeping willow leaves around her shoulders and through it he can clearly see her shivering.

"Punz? What the hell," he snaps, and wants to take it back immediately. "How did you…?" She gives him a crooked grin and half a shrug.

"Turns out I can fly like you. And I'm not bad at tracking frozen air currents. I don't really know, to be honest, but, uh, here I am!" She gives another shiver. "What are you doing?"

"You're gonna - …" He drifts off. What would happen? She wasn't human. She couldn't get sick anymore. So he just gives in and turns away again. "You should go back. The whole world needs spring."

"Do you, too?" she asks, and there is a careful lilt of teasing in her voice. Like maybe he really isn't mad. He listens to her sidle up alongside him, but sits a little ways back from the cliff. "I would say that if you want to be alone, I'd leave, but, uh. You see."

"You're a little bit far from home."

Rapunzel nervously laughs and tucks her chin to her knees. "Yes. So you may as well make this easy for both of us and tell me what's wrong. Who knows, I might be able to help a little bit?"

He doubts it. He knows it. She's the source of the problem, and even if he brings her back home and forces himself to not believe she's real, it won't make her ever go away.

She scoots closer. She's so warm.

He huffs. And she just scoots closer, so willing to listen.

So he forces himself to speak. "You're immortal now, you know, right?"

"Of course. I mean, it would be kind of silly to give me _another_ life that's also so numbered, right?"

"Sure. Well, you… or I…I've been around for a long time, and with that much time, you have a lot of space to fuck up."

"…What about time to forgive yourself?"

He ignores that because there isn't a real answer. "…And you just end up missing a lot of people, and there's so much time to miss them, that you don't know if you'll ever have time to forget. Do you know what I mean?"

"Not entirely. Keep going."

He clears his throat, unable to stop now. "I mean, when life continues, you're mortal, and you're dying… I was told once, that it's easier to forget things that way. Because your body, the parts keeping you alive, don't want you to remember things that will hurt you, since you gotta keep going and if you can move on from childhood and from happiness then you can leave sadness behind too. And maybe sickness."

Rapunzel idly sifts the snow in her hands, but he knows she's listening. It really _is_ her – he can still read her without even looking. His lively, gorgeous, forever Rapunzel.

He breathes, "You used to say that to me."

Rapunzel freezes. He listens to the snow fall from her hands, and he turns to look at her – green eyes listening to him more than her consciousness ever could, and her hand slips over his.

"Jack?" she asks.

"Huh?"

She's listened like this ever since the start.

Rapunzel whispers, "Who was I?"


	10. Chapter 10

.prompt.: **Technically, none.**

.universe.:** post-Tangled**

**X**

He's at the wedding.

Sort of.

Well, he's there for half of it, and that should count for something.

(Count for what?)

The display of how tolerant he is. How much he's grown up – jealousy doesn't stop him from functioning. Jack Frost is a mature boy now. Jack Frost isn't young and stupid and he knows that you have to work a little harder to keep someone yours.

(People aren't objects.)

Yeah. He knows that now too.

He listens to the church music and sees the kingdom file in, modest gowns and simple suits to not overshadow the princess, poised untrained grace and brightest smiles. He sits in one of the back pews, feet on the armrest, and if anyone could see him they'd surely think he'd snuck in for a nap during the early morning.

Yeah. A wedding before noon. When the sun's the brightest, though he's sure she would rather it be outdoors.

So, he stays until the place is packed, and the priest is there, cracking open dusty pages. Jack doesn't get priests. He doesn't get the whole ceremony. It's rings and vows that are just as easily broken as any other spoken words. Hell, you_ recite_ them. Just say exactly what you've been told, an echo you don't need to pay attention to as long as you say the right name.

He's not a really touchy-feely person but still, for all the roses and hype, he doesn't see how this can be romantic to anyone at all.

And Flynn's been there the whole time, but Jack's been trying to look at him in the right way (it's not Flynn's fault, it's not Flynn's fault, _he nearly had her drowned_ **_it's not Flynn's fault_**) and can't quite make himself do it. From where Jack is, the man is only a blur, white suit, gold trim, dark hair, fidgeting. He's not a prince, and he shouldn't be here.

Neither should Jack. Jack isn't even real.

When the music swells and he can see the shadows slipping to the entry of the church, he thinks she doesn't belong here either.

(Where does she belong?)

…

Jack isn't selfish.

Therefore, he does not have that answer.


End file.
